Tartarus Station

ROLAND: Hyperion, what in the fuck were you thinking?

LILITH: You assume they were thinking at all.

MORDECAI: I told you guys! I told you time and again! NEVER TRUST A CLAPTRAP!

LILITH: Give it a rest, Mordy, we know. You've been saying it since we arrived.

MORDECAI: Because I was right, damnit!

ROLAND: Yes, we acknowledge that, due to unforeseen circumstances, your weird paranoia around claptraps was proven accurate. Now please shut up about it.

MORDECAI: Oh fine. But I'm still right.

ROLAND: Right, so, explanation time. We are here at Tartarus Station up near Fryestone because apparently some Hyperion higher up wanted to muscle in on Pandora now that Atlas is reeling, but they for some reason thought that getting rid of us was a key factor in doing that. Which… why? What did we ever do to upset Hyperion? Why would they want to get rid of us?

LILITH: Maybe they think we're dangerous, since we kinda took on a whole army of Lance and came away laughing with all their stuff.

ROLAND: Okay, that's a fair point, but still, was this really the way they thought they could take us out? That method, by the way, was to hijack the Fryestone claptrap we met a month ago and reprogram it to try and get us killed. Get bandits to attack us.

LILITH: Which is a joke, since we've killed thousands of bandits at this point.

ROLAND: Trying to make us look bad around the community.

MORDECAI: Which is hilarious given we're the only reason most of them are still alive, plus all the things we did to help them out on a smaller level.

ROLAND: And point out to the authorities that we are a disturbance of the peace and a threat to the environment. Which… first of all, what authorities? This is Pandora, there is no law out here. Second of all, the environment is a threat to us. We're just defending ourselves. Third of all, who is going to listen to a claptrap of all things trying to badmouth us?

BRICK: Whoever came up with this idea is a real jack-ass.

ROLAND: No kidding. Anyway, while the claptrap was utterly ineffectual at even bothering us, for all the reasons I just highlighted, he did notice all of the times that claptraps were getting hurt, killed, or scraped around Pandora, and decided to do something about it.

MORDECAI: And so the claptrap decides to lead a revolution of his fellow claptraps. Just like I knew would happen someday.

LILITH: Okay, Mordy, buddy, you have a problem with claptraps.

MORDECAI: And now they have a problem with me, what's your point?

ROLAND: Right, so, Hyperion's plan backfired on them spectacularly, particularly since they were the only major user of claptraps on the planet. And when they found their soldiers couldn't handle the threat themselves, guess who they hired to solve the problem?

LILITH: Irony at its finest.

ROLAND: And now we're up at Tartarus Station to deal with the leading claptrap, who was reprogrammed to call himself the 'Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap' by the way, and take apart his operations. When we first arrived at the warp point we were up at the radio station, and in a shack near the station we found Tannis, who moved out here at some point to work with Hyperion in studying the Vault key. She asked us to go to the Hyperion Dump to gather some claptrap parts for a project she is working on. The dump had some bandits in it, shocker, and so we killed them as we gathered the parts. We were also picking up some mildly used tires for Marcus, who wanted to replace the ones he has on his bus. Given half the dump's contents were tires, it was both easier and harder than one might expect. Then we ran into a huge fire fight between the Hyperion soldiers and a horde of claptraps. The soldiers were doing alright at first… until they fired on us.

LILITH: Hey, that's their fault. They should have known better than to pick a fight with some badasses.

BRICK: Their armor looks stupid. So I broke it.

ROLAND: From there the fight devolved into a chaotic mess of us killing everything that wasn't us. The Hyperion troops are… decent I think. About as skilled as your average Lanceman, but they didn't last long once they made us their enemy. The claptraps though are very fragile, and their shields aren't very powerful. There were a lot of them though. Some that punch, some that slice, some with shotguns and rifles, and some that decided that blowing up in your face is the way to go. Screw those ones.

LILITH: They come out of nowhere, I swear! I had to keep my phasewalk on a hair trigger to get away from them.

BRICK: They died to make their boom, which I respect, but they cheat to kill with the boom, which is annoying.

ROLAND: Anyway, once all the enemies were dead we decided to collect a whole bunch of parts for Tannis, who was thrilled at the haul and paid us for it… only to turn around as say it wasn't enough and asked us to collect a bunch more. Which, given the reason we were here in the first place, wasn't much of an issue. After we spoke with her we headed down into the town proper, where we met with Mister Blake, some corporate officer of Hyperion who is working with us to help take care of the claptrap revolution.

LILITH: You know, I expected him to be creepier. Like, he looks menacing on the surface, but he's really not all that bad.

MORDECAI: Yeah, seems like a reasonable guy. We don't like him, he doesn't like us, we work together, it's pretty chill.

ROLAND: The first order of business was to go to the power plant to restore power to the town so we could lower the bridges leading to the other areas around the station. Before we headed down to Sander's Gorge to do that we were asked to reset some defense turrets along the town wall so that the town was safe from approach by bandits. That was a simple enough matter of finding the power cells, plugging them into their circuits and resetting the programming. Brick did something else, but he refuses to tell us what.

BRICK: [evil laughter]

LILITH: That's disturbing.

ROLAND: Yeah, no kidding. Anyway, we headed down to the gorge, after getting a message from Marcus asking us to collect some spices and rak meat for him. Never tried rak meat, but I can't imagine it's as good as skag.

MORDECAI: It's not normally, but in the hands of a master chef it can be really good. Actually tastes a lot like chicken when properly prepared.

LILITH: I don't believe you.

MORDECAI: I didn't either before I tried it.

ROLAND: We made our way through the gorge slowly, since our echo maps are… very poor in the warrens and tunnels that make up the place, but eventually we made our way through to the power station. And who should meet us there than General Knoxx himself.

LILITH: I'm guessing the INAC somehow managed to get a hold of Knoxx's New-U data and used that to resurrect him?

ROLAND: Almost certainly. Oh, I should mention, Knoxx was being mind controlled like nearly every bandit and Hyperion soldier we've met in the area aside from the dump. Apparently INAC developed a mind control device which hijacks the body's nervous system and overrides the brain with programming that the claptraps want to implant in people. The result is that bandits, Hyperion troops, even animals have been taken over and forced to fight for the claptrap army. Knoxx was no different. But he did have enough freedom to tell us to kill him again. Which we did.

LILITH: He was a lot less dangerous this time without his supporting mecha and medics. Especially with Brick keeping the claptraps off us while we fought him.

BRICK: They're punching bags made of metal. Softer than I'm used to punching.

ROLAND: Once Knoxx was dead again we activated the power plant, while INAC called us to gloat, saying we were far from victory and he would win and yadda yadda. We went back to the station, dropping off Marcus' food before reporting to Mister Blake. The next step in taking down the revolution was heading to the Dividing Faults Factory and shutting it down, since INAC had retooled it to start churning out claptraps. Marcus had another task for us while we were there, to collect bobbleheads of all things for his shop, and the Station managers also asked us to deal with the bandits in D-Fault who had managed to survive the claptrap assaults on them. Brick did another thing that he still refuses to explain to us.

BRICK: [menacing chuckling]

LILITH: Brick, if those things you did come back to bite us, I'm going to be very annoyed with you.

BRICK: Relax. We're not gonna see anything from it. Trust me.

LILITH: I'm not sure that I do.

ROLAND: We went to the factory and fought our way through the army of claptraps and their converted bandits and troopers. The bobbleheads were spread around the facility, and the D-Fault bandits were off to the side of the factory. The leader of the bandits there was literally named D. Fault, and seemed oddly proud of the fact that he and his band had survived being converted. I would feel bad about killing them after all the effort they went through to survive, but… they're bandits.

LILITH: Yeah, bandits don't really get much sympathy with all the crap they pull, no matter who is abusing them.

BRICK: Especially us.

ROLAND: When we reached the factory entrance we were met by Ned crawling out of a garbage bin, so clearly INAC resurrected him as well. Not that he was much of a threat in his normal form. The factory floor itself was crawling with claptraps, so we had to liberally use our grenades and rockets to clear them all out, destroying most of the assembly line in the process. Just to be sure though we shut down the coolant pumps too, by blowing them up. INAC called us to cover up his worries with more gloating, but it clearly wasn't working.

MORDECAI: After everything we've fought and killed, the idea of a regular old claptrap being intimidating is… just no. It ain't happening.

ROLAND: That was the last thing we did for today. Tomorrow we will continue our work to take care of INAC by going after a device which will rewire him and shut down all of the programming changes it introduced into the claptraps and mind-controlled people and creatures, ending the revolution in one fell swoop. So that'll be fun. Roland, signing off.